How to set up a B2B go-to-market funnel that better aligns Sales and Marketing

A well set up go-to-market funnel is essential to Sales and Marketing alignment. It ensures that go-to-market efforts across both teams are optimised to target and nurture the right leads at the right time.

In this post, we’re going to cover how to set up a B2B go-to-market funnel tailored to Sales and Marketing alignment… and so a more efficient buying journey.

We’ll cover:

• Sales and Marketing alignment

• Setting up a B2B go-to-market funnel

  • Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

  • Sales Accepted Leads (SAL)

  • Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

  • Won Deal

• Don’t forget about the customer journey

• Measuring success with the same yardstick
  

A go-to-market funnel tailored to Sales and Marketing alignment 

Definition: A B2B go-to-market funnel establishes the different stages of the customer journey as accounts move towards buying the product. B2B go-to-market teams attract and nurture accounts through the funnel to convert them from leads and opportunities into customers.

Any conversation about a B2B go-to-market funnel needs to start with Sales and Marketing alignment. And vice versa.

The customer journey is the product of Marketing and Sales efforts which capture and nurture accounts across the line.

Take ROAS. In B2B, ROAS is wholly dependent on Sales being able to close leads. Conversely, a healthy Sales pipeline depends on quality Leads being funnelled through (more on how to track this below).

Or as Drew Smith put it recently, “You can go buy all the leads you want, but if you can't get them to sales, they won't turn into anything. If you're sending them to sales at the wrong time (usually too early), they won't turn into anything. If sales doesn't know that they've been sent, or why, nothing will come from those leads.”

Marketing and Sales need to be aligned in how they see Leads through the funnel. They need to be talking the same language. They need to be addressing the same customer needs. They need to understand the same frustrations.

Every chink in that chain is a delay in pipeline.

To help businesses bring their Sales and Marketing teams closer, we shared 10 practical ways to align sales and marketing here.

Of these, a go-to-market funnel that totally aligns Sales and Marketing is amongst the most important.

So let’s get to it then shall we?

Setting up a B2B go-to-market funnel

Measuring and setting up an optimised B2B go-to-market funnel is the surest way to achieve Sales and Marketing alignment by default.

The go-to-market funnel should be guided towards knowing how accounts make their way through the buying journey - and aiding them accordingly.

That is, it needs to organise leads into stages that help you track and tailor touchpoints towards each group, and ultimately see them convert down the funnel.

In this way, you need to use the stages/conversions that make most sense for your business model.

Here’s an example similar to how we have set up our go-to-market funnel. 👇

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

The Marketing Qualified Lead metric is a ‘hot potato’ in B2B marketing circles. With many claiming the metric is now redundant.

However, we contend that there’s really nothing wrong with MQL as a go-to-market metric. So long it’s defined meaningfully.

That is, so long as it’s defined in a way that suggests actual buying intent at a point that Sales might be able to sell to them.

Does someone downloading an ebook or subscribing to a blog really show buying intent? Not really. If you’re measuring these conversions as MQLs you’re setting up Sales for failure.

A well-defined MQL

Measured by a stronger conversion, like a demo request or free trial sign up, the MQL becomes a significantly more useful indicator of buyer intent. (At Dreamdata, we’re defining MQLs as a Demo Call or a Free Signup.)

Naturally, the intent level will vary. But as it’s a metric relatively early in the journey, this margin of error is acceptable. That’s why there are subsequent conversion stages in the go-to-market funnel…

In fact, because MQLs are early in the journey it allows us to adjust tactics if demand, or the quality of the demand, suddenly drops.

Late in the journey, we have no chance of impacting if a salesperson has a bad day with an SQL.

If you know: The length of your average customer journey, your average deal size, and the revenue target for any given month it’s very much possible to reverse engineer the amount of MQLs needed to hit revenue targets. More on this in this article.

Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)

Next, we have the Sales Accepted Lead (SAL). Think of the SAL as the bridge between the Marketing to Sales funnels.

A SAL is an MQL that has been checked and accepted as 1) showing enough intent and 2) being of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) quality. 

A quick word on ICP. It’s vital to any go-to-market strategy to have a well-defined and accurate (read, data-based) ICP. This will ensure all your activities target the right persona at the right time. Fail to get this right and you’ll spend copious amounts of time on dead-end leads.

The SAL essentially means that a lead has been approved by the sales team as having the potential to sell to. After becoming a SAL, the sales process begins.

In this way, the SAL helps us measure:

• How many of marketing’s leads are of opportunity quality - and thus the effectiveness of marketing on future pipeline.

• And oppositely, how many SALs Sales might be able to close. That is, after this point, Marketing is pretty much ‘off-the-hook’.

This helps further connect and distribute the funnels between teams and identify where there are shortcomings. And holds both teams accountable to each other!

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

With all leads that meet ICP now on Sales’ plate, the next step is prioritisation. Enter SQL.

Prioritising ensures that maximum effort is spent on those leads that are most likely to become customers within the sales SQL-to-Won timeline.

That is, the Sales Qualification should focus on the likelihood to buy *soon* (defined by your sales cycle).

Note for this (and a lot of other things), you need to track and measure the time to value metric.

But how do you know which of the SALs need to come first?

This will be highly dependent on your unique business model. But some of the tell-tale signs (for a B2B SaaS product) include:

• Having the budget to purchase your product,

• Having the infrastructure to use it, 

• Knowing that your product or service solves their pain points, or

• If you’re operating a product-led model, account activity in product can also be an invaluable measure for scoring leads. More on product-led sales in this post.

Once labelled SQL, they're ready to move into your sales process.

Find out more about how Dreamdata can help your Sales team close more deals in this article.

Won deal

The final conversion is, of course, won deal.

There is little to add here apart from stating that it’s not really the final stage.

Once customers buy the product, they’re handed over to Customer Success who will then funnel them through various other stages of onboarding. Not that Customer Success has not been involved in the Sales process itself 👀

In any case, eventually, customers will have to renew their contract and possibly move up tier… so they’ll have to be upselled.

We’ll cover all this in more detail at another point. Suffice to say that ‘closed-won’ is only the final stage of the go-to-market funnel.

With this, you have all the basics for setting up a go-to-market funnel that better aligns sales and marketing… which will help you close more deals.

Analysing the B2B go-to-market funnel

With that said, the go-to-market funnel isn’t static. That is, what’s happening in the funnels changes over time, say as campaigns are introduced, business goals change, ICP mutates, etc.

So you need to keep an eye on these changes.

Here’s how.

Go back to your Won deals. Inspect their characteristics.

• Is there anything about the ‘type’ that sticks out? Think segments here: size, etc.

• How long did they take at each stage?

• What were the conversion rates for these types at each stage?

• Were there enough of these leads coming at SAL stage? Is there anything Marketing needs to change?

Do this with some frequency and you’ll always have your go-to-market funnel (and so Sales and Marketing alignment) in good order.

Don’t forget about the customer journey!

It’s too common for go-to-market teams to view the customer journey (only) through their funnels.

If you’re doing that, stop!

The go-to-market funnel should not be confused with the actual customer journey. 

The go-to-market funnel is linear and artificially broken down into stages, whereas the B2B customer journey is more like a meandering river with a bunch of tributaries (stakeholders within the same account) stemming to and from. See more about the distinction in this Linkedin post.

And while focusing on the most relevant stages of the journey is useful for operationalising efforts, it’s pretty unhelpful when it comes to understanding the customer journey.

Both teams need to be able to see where leads are coming from and how they’re moving down the pipeline.

Something by way of conclusion

So, to close the circle. If you want to successfully align your Sales and Marketing teams you need a tailored go-to-market funnel. It will allow your teams to efficiently target, nurture and sell to the best possible leads.

But! Be sure not to ignore the actual customer journey!